Ten
I DROVE BACK ALONG THE COAST ROADS AND TRIED NOT to think about Brock Taylor and Tommy Owens and my father. By the time I pulled into my drive, I had succeeded: I was thinking about a cold Jameson and a warm bed when my phone rang. It was Shane Howard, and he didn’t sound good.
“I’m here,” he said. “The Guards will need to be called.”
“Why is that, Shane?” I said.
“Because Jessica…my wife is dead. I think she’s been stabbed. I’m here.”
“You think she’s been stabbed?”
“Yes. I need to call the Guards.”
“Just, before you do, Shane, tell me where ‘here’ is. Are you at home?”
“No. I’m at the…house. The show house. I don’t know the address. Somewhere in Bayview.”
Jessica Howard had been on her way to show a house when we parted. I rolled down the window. The night smelled of sulfur and the ooze of rotting leaves. I tossed the Reillys’ Sig Sauer into a holly bush at the side of my house, pulled out of the drive and headed south toward Bayview.
“All right Shane, look around the room, Jessica’s bag, there’ll be a prospectus, a leaflet with pictures of the house somewhere, can you have a look for that?”
I heard some background sounds, and then Shane’s voice again.
“I have it,” he said, his voice cracking. He made a long, low sound, a sigh, or a moan, then he said, “There’s hardly any blood. I’ll have to ask the Guards about that.”
“Just read out the address, Shane.”
He gave me the address of a house in a cul-de-sac off Rathdown Road.
“I’m nearly there, Shane; just sit tight till I reach you.”
“I have to call the Guards,” he said again.
“I’ll call them for you,” I said.
I owed Dave Donnelly a phone call anyway.
I parked on the road and walked carefully through the darkened cul-de-sac: nine detached seventies bungalows in a U shape set around a raised oval of well-maintained green space. The show house was fourth on the left. I didn’t have to count; Shane Howard had parked his Merc right up on the pavement, so the neighbors could take note of the registration; already someone had left a pink slip of paper beneath the windscreen. It read: This is not a public car park. Residents’ cars only. Please do not park here again.
The smart play would have been not to disturb the crime scene. But Shane was already in there. And besides, being a real estate agent was as smart a play as you could make in Dublin these days, and all it got Jessica Howard was dead. She lay on the maple floor of the large living room with two puncture wounds beneath her left breast. There was very little blood, the merest filigree on her blouse; rather more on her hands, where she must have tried to defend herself. Her legs were twisted and splayed, and her skirt was up around her thighs, but her stockings and underwear were intact; there were no obvious signs of sexual assault. Livid patches stretched across her chest and face; they were turning purple, which meant she probably had been dead for six hours or more. Around the time when Shane Howard claimed he had been rambling around the pine forest in Castlehill. I thought of Jessica Howard’s beautiful, sad face that morning. “I’m beyond therapy,” she had said. “I’m out the other side.”
“Where’s all her blood?” Shane said.
Last time I’d seen him, he’d been hunched in a ball on the floor in Rowan House; now he was sitting crouched on the steps that led from the hall down into the living room; it seemed like his great frame was buckling under the strain, like the earth was dragging him down.
“It looks like she was stabbed in the heart. When that happens, the bleeding is mostly internal. It probably means she died quickly, and without much pain,” I said, the latter without much conviction: I couldn’t imagine any pain greater than knowing you were about to die.
Shane nodded blankly at me, then attempted a brave smile. I couldn’t hold his gaze.
“We were about to separate. Already separated, really, about to start the old divorce thing. I held out. Hoped she’d come back. But she wanted to be free. Always did. No one could ever capture her.”
“Shane, why are you here?”
“She always told me where she was showing a house. In case she got into trouble. There was that one, in England, years ago, young one, just vanished, showing someone a house. And Jessica’s on her own, no backup, no office. Even though we were separated, I’d still look out for her. She’d call, or text, to say she was home. It was how we started really, she was always ending up in a jam with some lad, out on the street, or a gang of fellas at a party. Shane to the rescue. That’s how she…then throughout the marriage, she’d go off on a wander…lost weekend with some actor who’d end up thumping her…or some situation in a hotel, she crying down the phone…Shane to the rescue. Each time I’d forgive her. She made an awful fucking clown of me, I know that. But sure, what can you do?”
“Tell me you didn’t kill her.”
“I didn’t kill her. I remembered, up at Rowan House, that I hadn’t heard from her. So I drove down to check. This is what I found.”
“The Guards will make you chief suspect, you know that.”
Shane looked at his dead wife and nodded.
“Sure I have you, don’t I? You can find the fucker who did this to her.”
“I can try.”
“Good man,” he said. “And there’s Dinny Finnegan. Let Dinny earn his fucking money for a change, the fat bastard.”
With that, he let his head sink back onto his chest.
I couldn’t raise Dave Donnelly on his phone, so I rang him at home and got his wife, Carmel.
“Hey gorgeous. He can’t talk to you. He’s asleep.”
“It’s only half-ten. What is he, getting old?”
There was a muffled growl and a shriek of laughter, and a crash, as if the phone had fallen on the floor. Carmel came back on the phone, her voice hoarse and breathy.
“For fuck’s sake, Ed, it’s a date night, our first in ages: now kindly fuck off and call him in the morning.”
“I’m sorry, Carmel darlin’, but it can’t wait. Tell Dave Shane Howard’s wife is dead, and I’m here with Howard at the crime scene.”
My voice must have carried across the bed. Dave came on the phone immediately. As I gave him the address, I could hear Carmel wailing in frustration in the background. I ended the call and we went outside and sat in Shane Howard’s Mercedes until the cops arrived.
Superintendent Fiona Reed got the case. She was a hard-bodied woman in her thirties with short red hair and a constant air of irritated disapproval which I had never managed to dispel. She took a quick look at the body, and then, as the crime scene examination team from the Garda Technical Bureau went to work, with photographers and fingerprint and mapping and forensics officers in their white protective suits streaming under the blue and white tape that secured the house, and the State Pathologist expected, Fiona Reed leant in through the car window and told me to get out.
“I want to talk to Mr. Howard. And Dave Donnelly wants to talk to you. Seafield Station.”
I was distracted by a camera strobe, and turned to see a press photographer across the road and a camera crew arriving. I turned back to Superintendent Reed, but before I had time to formulate the thought, she had a defensive finger in my face.
“I don’t know where the fuck the leak is, but it’s not coming out of Seafield. It could be the Technical Bureau, it could be the NBCI, but when I find the fucker, I’ll have him gutted and spayed. Answer your question?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grinning at what I took to be a minor victory.
She turned to summon a couple of uniforms to deal with Shane Howard, then turned back and gave me a big grin.
“By the way, you’re fucked, Loy. And Dave agrees. This time, you’re fucked, once and for all. And not before time.”
As I walked down toward my car, Denis Finnegan was sailing up the cul-de-sac in another vast black Mercedes. The Howards must’ve bought them by the fleet.